Content marketers and IBMers are bombarded with emails and content, so we came up with a better way to engage them: by developing a thought leadership campaign that would entertain and inspire our audience to become best-in-class storytellers.
There are over 300,000 IBMers around the world who need to learn how to be effective storytellers and make great content. How can we reach and engage them to be better thought leaders themselves? How do we set the example ourselves as thought leaders? Our own internal channels are flooded and result in only a few hundred engagements per post. We need to rethink the thought leadership campaign.
IBM Originals is the content marketing arm of IBM. We have been inspiring, training and leading our employees for the last 18 months to become great storytellers. We want them to move beyond the traditional product-centric B2B approach and use more human storytelling. Because, after all, there is no more emotional decision that picking a multi-million dollar tech solution that can make or break your career. It’s time to kill the white paper and create stuff that people actually want to break through and build relationships.
Hosted by George Hammer, Chief Content Officer at IBM, Content Cantina is an episodic talk show whose fictional location is inspired by the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars. In it, George talks to some of the most interesting and knowledgeable characters in the content marketing universe who share their expertise. We simultaneously post episodes internally to our community and externally on LinkedIn.
Our Linkedin post engagement rate increased 200% (2019 vs 2018) and our rank in searches for “Content Marketing” has increased three-fold YoY.
The industry is recognizing our thought leadership, having led to Cantina episodes being filmed on location at events in 2019, find new guests and audiences as a result.
The campaigns that have deployed our best practices and thought leadership have resulted in 31% increase in ROI and over $5B in revenue leads.
Season 2 featured our first true celebrity guest.
